dolphin842
Apr 28, 2010, 12:41 PM
Hi all,
So my original iMac 17" (Core Duo 1.8GHz) is starting to show its age, not necessarily the graphics and processor so much as the 2GB ram ceiling. I find myself swapping like crazy with any moderate workload.
Eventually I will be upgrading to a Mini (once the specs make it worth upgrading) or an iMac (once the QA on the LCDs begins to settle down). However, I need a modest performance boost to hold me over for the next several months. Since RAM is already maxed out, I was thinking about getting a small OCZ ssd, replace it as a boot drive, and move my user folder off to one of my external drives.
The question I'm hoping folks could answer is: Given that I'm already swapping pretty heavily on a regular basis, would the SSD make the swapping happen fast enough to produce a noticeable performance increase? I realize that I'd be limited to 150MB/sec due to the SATA I bus, but even that should be quite a bit faster than the old 160GB hard drive, correct? If anyone has experience with how an SSD affects the performance of a RAM-constrained Mac, I'm all ears. :)
So my original iMac 17" (Core Duo 1.8GHz) is starting to show its age, not necessarily the graphics and processor so much as the 2GB ram ceiling. I find myself swapping like crazy with any moderate workload.
Eventually I will be upgrading to a Mini (once the specs make it worth upgrading) or an iMac (once the QA on the LCDs begins to settle down). However, I need a modest performance boost to hold me over for the next several months. Since RAM is already maxed out, I was thinking about getting a small OCZ ssd, replace it as a boot drive, and move my user folder off to one of my external drives.
The question I'm hoping folks could answer is: Given that I'm already swapping pretty heavily on a regular basis, would the SSD make the swapping happen fast enough to produce a noticeable performance increase? I realize that I'd be limited to 150MB/sec due to the SATA I bus, but even that should be quite a bit faster than the old 160GB hard drive, correct? If anyone has experience with how an SSD affects the performance of a RAM-constrained Mac, I'm all ears. :)
